Vintage 1950s Pineywoods Brand Sweet Potato Crate Label 🍠 H B Howard Pittsburg Texas Color Lithograph Pine Forest

Pineywoods Brand Sweet Potato Crate Label 🍠 H. B. Howard, Pittsburg, Texas

Size: 9" x 9"

This one makes me want to go for a walk in the woods. A tall pine forest with a split-rail fence running through it, three big sweet potatoes piled up front, a red banner across the corner - PINEYWOODS BRAND, SWEET POTATOES, 50 LBS. NET, PRODUCE OF U.S.A., PACKED & DISTRIBUTED BY H. B. HOWARD, PITTSBURG, TEXAS. Never used. I have a stack of these, so yours will look just like this one.

🌲 The Piney Woods

The brand borrowed the name of the Piney Woods, the great pine forest - longleaf, shortleaf and loblolly - that spreads across East Texas and on into southern Arkansas, western Louisiana and southeastern Oklahoma, some 54,400 square miles of it. H. B. Howard put it right on the label, trees and all. He packed under at least one other name, too, an ATOMIC brand, and the label dealers put both in the 1950s; nobody seems to have written down much about the man himself.

🚂 Pittsburg, Texas

Pittsburg got its post office in 1855, named Pittsburgh for the family of William Harrison Pitts; the H came off in 1893, which is why the label spells it the way it does. It's the county seat of Camp County, which was split off from Upshur County in 1874 and named for John Lafayette Camp. Two railroads crossed the county in the late 1870s, the East Line and Red River and the Texas and St. Louis, and the town stayed a supply and shipping point for farmers well into the 1900s.

When the boll weevil and worn-out soil finished off cotton, sweet potatoes took over as the money crop around Pittsburg. James A. Sewell, who came to town in 1918, built a big potato storage house behind his home for his own crop and his neighbors', and shipped thousands of sweet potato plants to Texas farmers every spring. Texas grew 133,000 acres of sweet potatoes in 1927, more than any other state that year, and even after the weevil hit the crop hard in the 1930s, Camp County was still one of the four biggest sweet potato counties in Texas in 1950, alongside Smith, Upshur and Cherokee. Howard wasn't the only shipper in town, either - Pittsburg yam labels turn up for T. H. Barrett's Big Boy brand and Leo Bockmon's Honest John.

✈️ The Ezekiel Airship

And here's the story every Pittsburg kid knows. Reverend Burrell Cannon, a Baptist preacher and sawmill man, sold $20,000 in stock and had a flying machine built at the Thorsell foundry in town, based on the wheels within wheels in the Book of Ezekiel - and the story goes that one Sunday in 1902 it lifted off and flew about 160 feet, ten or twelve feet up, in front of a handful of witnesses - a year before the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk. Cannon himself was off preaching that day, nobody ever proved it, and historians mostly don't buy it - but the airship was wrecked by a storm near Texarkana on its way to the 1904 World's Fair, and a full-size replica sits in Pittsburg's old Cotton Belt depot museum today. Pittsburg is also where Aubrey Pilgrim bought a feed and seed store in 1946 - his brother Bo soon joined him, they gave away chicks with the feed, and it grew into Pilgrim's Pride. James and Patricia Cavender opened Cavender's Boot City there in 1965 with three styles of boots, and Carroll Shelby was born just down the road in Leesburg in 1923.

🌭 Pittsburg Hot Links

One more thing Pittsburg is proud of. In 1897 Charlie Hasselback, a butcher of German stock, started selling his hot links raw out of a shop on Main Street; by 1918 he was serving them cooked, with crackers, on heavy butcher paper, and railroad crews on both lines planned their stops around lunch at his place. He sold out in 1929 to O. O. Smith, and Pittsburg hot links are still made in town by the million.

That forest scene is a beauty framed in a kitchen, a cabin or anywhere you'd like a little East Texas on the wall.